Tuesday, May 31, 2011

THE END FOR NUCLEAR POWER IN GERMANY

Nuclear power, always considered environmentally challenging by the average informed person, as its long and expensive planning and approval processes have consistently indicated, has finally come to the end of its short life--at least in Germany and Switzerland. Here too, in the US it was essentially a dead issue up to recently (with no new plants approved in decades, after the disasters of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl sunk home into the public consciousness). That is until President Obama raised it from the dead with his plan to build new plants in response to the oil crisis. But that was at a time when the country was reeling from a reactionary groundswell, fed in part by a gut-response to the election of a black president, and economic issues such as the collapse of the housing and financial bubble, the resulting Great Recession, a huge government layout to save the banks, a monster deficit, three wars going at once, and a government that now borrows 40 cents on every dollar it spends. My opinion was that Obama just wanted to keep his head above water as he dodged the rotten fruit being tossed his way by the discontented right, and even some of us in the middle. His decision was in part the political reality of a weak president having to throw a few bones to the yelping dogs on his right.

As has been the case for the last eleven years, under the administrations of G.W Bush and Obama (who seems to have taken on the political identity one may characterizes as a more elegant and erudite "dark phase Bush"), the rest of the cognizant, rational world has attempted to forge ahead into the 21st Century to face the problems visible and foreseen on the horizon, while here in the USA under Obama's leadership we appear to be leading the charge back into the 19th century! To understand that statement let's look at one aspect of our government's decision making history in recent years relating to nuclear power.

The devastating images of the tragedy in Japan have flooded the airwaves in recent months, daily underscoring the helplessness of one of the world's most technically proficient and socially structured societies as they attempt to face one of the most mindboggling, set of multifaceted technical, social, biological and economic crises ever to affect that nation. the images and the facts have pushed decision-makers around the world to properly rethink their dependence on nuclear power. In the crisis in Japan, they see a modern nation faced with myriad problems unleashed by this man-made disaster which will haunt that nation for generations to come and leave parts of it scarce land-area as nuclear exclusion zones for thousands of years. What sane leader would want have his or her nation take the same chances? Which nations could calm their fears by stating: "that can't happen here!" Can they claim: it would not happen here because: we are better prepared, or more technically savvy, or have a more homogeneous and compliant society? No, there are none which can make those statements honestly. Japan is (or was) all of those things as well as the third largest economy in the world. If it can happen to Japan--who built the very same GE-designed nuclear plants we use today here in the USA--it can and will happen here and elsewhere too. Just give it time.

So the world's reaction against nuclear is only a rational response to the recent fallout, both figurative and actual, from the disaster at the nuclear plant at Fukishima, as well as the history of past disasters in that accident-plagued industry (though they will deny it and claim thousands of years of continual safe use). Some of the world's thoughtful and well-informed leaders have rightly put the cap on the foolish and dangerous flirtation with nuclear energy (begun here in USA during the Eisenhower administration only as a public relations ploy). Not so in the USA, where, for a large segment of the ill-informed population, a two-thousand year-old (plus) Judeo-Christian tract holds sway as a the font of all factual information (even regarding nuclear power which could not have been dreamt of by the authors), others decry modern science, and some place their confidence in a form or pseudoscience, termed "revealed science" while the masses are uninformed, or too busy trying to make ends meet to care.

Those who actually try to evaluate facts have added up the threats from the Chernobly disaster, Three Mile Island, and now the Fukishima accident and have concluded that there is a necessity for reevaluation of our dependance on nuclear power. On the other hand, the Obama administration and the reactionary USA, remain adamantly against change and modernity, and unable to disengage from the money and sway of the nuclear power industry. They refuse to alter plans for expanding our dependency on a source of power now deemed too dangerous to allocate to the geenrations of our children and grandchildren by most of the world's thoughtful leaders.

Today, May 31, 2011, I read in the NYTimes that Germany, under the center-right government of Angela Merkel, fourth largest economy in the World after USA, China, and Japan, has decided to close its 17 nuclear power plants permanently by 2022. They will have eleven years to accomplish that goal. Angela Merkel, a PhD in physics, who knows the science of nuclear power, has concluded that nuclear power is "too dangerous and too unpredictable to put our faith in long term". Germany, which is dependent upon about one-fourth of its power from nuclear (as is the US)has decided to turn to renewables, solar power, hydroelectric, and conservation to make up the difference. The decision,states Merkel, will make the Germans more capable of dealing with the coming energy shortages and disruptions, increase jobs, and give that nation a technical edge in the mid and latter part of the 21 century when other nations will be struggling to survive oil shortages and nuclear exclusions zones which last for thousands of years. Switzerland which also is dependent upon a substantial percent of nuclear derived power is also abandoning these plants by 2035. So goes the attitudes in the more progressive, logical and objective-thinking parts of the modern world. Here in the USA were are still proceeding in the opposite direction.